One other possible downside to naturalistic constructed languages

Take a look at this message written yesterday in Interlingua and English by a user of the language who has decided to cut down on his Interlingua activities a bit. On Auxlang we often talk about how extremely naturalistic languages like Interlingua have a tendency to be pulled in certain directions by native speakers of languages that serve as source languages, because it may come across as a bit odd to see a language that has put so much effort into looking natural, but still uses something like esseva for the past tense of the verb to be.

The post above also shows that this naturalistic appeal may also give users a desire to actually start using a "natural" language like Spanish or Portuguese or Italian after spending so much time with Interlingua, since with a fair amount of competency with Interlingua these languages are generally pretty easy to understand, and upon reaching that point the Interlingua can begin to look pretty small in comparison - with Spanish/Portuguese/Italian one can find discussions on just about anything, but in Interlingua (and Ido, and Lingua Franca Nova and all the rest) one tends to see the same people every day. So it's hard to say whether this is simply due to the language having a naturalistic appearance or whether it is due to the size of the community, or perhaps both.

One wonders if a language like Lingua Franca Nova wouldn't also bleed into something like Papiamentu as well. I actually find this to be unlikely since there are so many creoles in the world compared to the number of major Romance languages, and so LFN comes across almost as just another type of Romance creole, one of dozens and dozens found around the world.